Cloud.  I’ve been hearing that word a lot lately, and I mean a lot!  Cloud telephony, service cloud, sales cloud, cloud computing, SaaS cloud, telephony in the cloud… the list goes on.  But what does that really mean?  I’ve been putting the Angel.com logo in a cloud icon in PowerPoint presentations for years (hence the image)… does that mean we were the original cloud telephony provider, or the revolutionaries in the cloud space? 

The first big place I really ran face first into the “cloud” world was at Dreamforce 2008.  Salesforce.com used “cloud” in all their banners, and even hired people to walk around San Francisco with giant inflated cloud balloons tethered to their backs.  And since that time, salesforce has rolled the cloud theme into everything they do, including the main headings on their website. 

Lately, there has been an explosion of the use of “cloud” in our space — that being telephony (IVR, call center, etc.) – with the likes of Twilio, Tropo and Cloudvox most directly, and Voxeo, IfByPhone, etc. in subtext.  The notion that cloud represents is, to boil it down as I see it, the ability to access any solution you want, from any where you want, at any time you want — not being tied to hardware or installed software somewhere — and the ability to easily intermingle different types of solutions so everything works in conjunction.  I’m sure there are better definitions out there, and I may just be plain wrong in mine, so feel free to add your definition in the comment section. 

Dave Michels gives some interesting commentary on all of this on his Pin Drop Soup blog… “powerful cloud based tools for voice enabling web applications.”  Let’s see… does Angel.com fit the cloud mold:

• Hosted service that can be accessed/managed from any web browser any where — CHECK
• API to connect voice to any web service — CHECK (had web service stuff for years)
• Fully integrated with other cloud services such as CRM, workforce management, payment gateways, etc. — CHECK (again, had this for years)
• Internal/external database integration — CHECK (years again)
• Cool customer integrations that make use of mobile apps and other ‘hot topic’ things — CHECK

What else do we need to be “cloud certified”?  All this and you don’t need a programming degree to do it (we have a nifty GUI that does all the code for you.) 

But, with all that, I have to ask… Is “cloud” here to stay, or is it the “maverick” of 2009?  Seems like “Voice 2.0″ was replaced by “cloud telephony” within a year, so what will next years buzz word be!?  “Angel” and “cloud” go hand in hand, so I guess I’ll throw our hat into the cloud ring too.

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We’ve just launched an exciting new partnership with SimulScribe, one of the leading providers of near-real-time voice-to-text transcription, to power Angel.com applications that require fast transcription and automatic delivery via email or via a web service into a back-end, such as a CRM or a simple database.

Our first integration is powering our newly released salesforce.com solution, SalesByFone. In a nutshell, the application lets field salespeople call into their salesforce.com account and leave a note to themselves, or send an email to a contact, by just speaking, and then have their spoken message transcribed and saved to salesforce or emailed to their contact.

Imagine not only the time the solution will save field sales (compare the number of steps it takes to log a note about a meeting if done via traditional browser versus making a call and saying the name of the contact and then speaking the note), but also the new level of consistency in logging and tracking it will introduce in the routine of its users.

The obvious next integration using SimulScribe will revolve around support: mainly, transcribing support tickets and saving them into a support CRM back-end.

Stay tuned for the next integration and the next partnership announcement!

We recently released a new IVR / CRM White Paper entitled, “5 Ways To Put Your CRM Data to Work for You and Your Customers”. 

Here’s a brief abstract:

Organizations that leverage IVR applications with their customer service functions understand that one key to generating a positive caller experience is providing self-service options, or providing callers with fast and efficient phone-based interactions to automatically deliver real-time information at their convenience. Simply put: the best way to serve your customers is to have the information they need, when they need it.

Information from your CRM system can also be used in an automated fashion to provide the caller with personalized information at the start of the call. IVR systems can be set to read data such as whether the caller is a VIP customer or may have recently ordered one of your products, upfront and respond accordingly. By doing this you accomplish increased customer satisfaction in two ways: 1) VIP customers can be addressed as such, sent into a special queue with more succinct IVR options and shorter on hold times, making them feel that they are appreciated as customers; 2) a customer who has recently purchased your product or submitted a help desk ticket can be identified by caller ID, and given the information they are likely looking for – such as order or ticket status – immediately without having to wait on hold to speak with an agent.

In essence, integrating your CRM system — such as salesforce.com, NetSuite, SugarCRM, Oracle, etc. — with your IVR and phone system allows you to address sales, marketing and support problems such as:

• Giving hands-free, voice-enabled access to your CRM database to sales reps so they can get information from the database and update information through a simple phone call, without the need for a computer or internet connection.
• Providing personalized self-service options to your customers, allowing you to decrease costs by minimizing agent usage on routine support calls such as case/order status.
• Automatically capturing all phone leads to increase your total number of sales and marketing prospects by populating caller data directly into your CRM application.
• Capturing and reporting on satisfaction levels of your customers to gain increased insight into satisfaction at the customer level in your CRM over time.
• Recording and analyzing all phone calls made and received by sales reps or agents to perform quality control on under performing agents and training for new reps.

One important point to understand… this is NOT Blackberry or smart phone access to CRM data.  This is hands-free, fast access to data through a phone call.  Figure this — through a (non-scientific) experiment, I calculated the time it takes to update a record in my CRM database through 3 different methods, as if I were a sales rep on the road who just completed a meeting and wanted to update the prospect record with meeting notes.

• Laptop:  Roughly 10 minutes to start up my laptop, login to my CRM account, update a record and shut down
• Smart phone (iPhone):  Almost 9 minutes performing the same task with cellular access
• Angel.com phone call:  3.5 minutes performing the same task with a phone call through the Angel.com voice-enabled IVR system — which I could do while driving to my next appointment!

Your sales reps can access and update data on the road while driving; customers can get status updates automatically through a phone call to the system; survey data goes directly into your CRM database through a phone call. 

Download the IVR/CRM integration white paper or visit the Angel.com IVR/CRM integration web page to find out how you can get the same functionality for your company!

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As you may know, the premier expo for the CRM industry, DestinationCRM, and the speech industry’s annual event, SpeechTek, are both holding their respective gatherings this year in New York City at the Marriott Marquis Hotel. DetinationCRM 2007 will take place between August 21 and 22, while SpeechTek 2007 will take place between August 20 and 23.

I’m glad to see the two conferences brought together under one roof. I’ve always been a big believer in the still mainly untapped possibilities of phone-enabling CRM — or, if you prefer, CRM-enabling the phone. Think about it: if you are a sales person, what do you do all day long? You type stuff into your CRM and you talk over the phone. What do you do if you are in support? You type stuff into your CRM and you talk over the phone. In other words, you type stuff into your CRM and talk over the phone before you close your deals, and you do the same after you close your deals!

And yet, the CRM and the telephone continue to be used as if they lived in completely different worlds. Simple stuff like logging your phone activity into your CRM, accessing your CRM data by telephone, capturing data about the interactions between your prospects and your sales people, or your clients and your support agents, etc. — pretty basic stuff — continues to elude most CRM systems.

Here at Angel.com, we have already converted the vision of phone-enabling the CRM into concrete solutions for our clients. So far, we have phone-enabled Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and Netsuite.

So, if you use any of those three solutions for your CRM, contact us and we will take care of you.

If you are using some other CRM and would be interested in deploying an inbound or outbound IVR, or Call Center solution, contact us and we will work with you to integrate with your CRM.

If you are an integrator and are interested in working with us to integrate Angel.com with some other CRM, fill out our partner application and we can talk.

Tracking marketing spend is always an issue. Companies spend money on many different campaigns to market their product(s) and struggle to report on the ROI of these marketing campaigns. As a marketing professional at a B2B company, I face the ongoing struggle to figure out the best way of tracking the leads that come in through our marketing campaigns. The web allows us to easily get our message out, and different web campaigns come with built-in tracking. But what about the most common connection you have with your leads/prospects — the phone. How do you track different web marketing campaigns through the phone?

Sure, you can beg your sales reps to ask each caller where they heard about your company, and you can hope that the caller actually remembers where they found you — neither of these has ever worked well for me. Instead, you can do what we at Angel.com have recently taken to doing. With our IVR and Salesforce.com integration we can now get much more exact tracking of where our phone leads came from and automatically store it directly in our CRM system.

Try this… for each marketing campaign you run, put a different phone number on the marketing piece. When people dial that specific number, you’ll know which campaign they came from. The call information, including “dialed number” will be populated directly into your Salesforce.com account so you can generate reports on these calls. Click on the screenshot at right for a larger image… for each call that comes into your sales department you can get call stats such as time of call, caller ID, hold time, talk time, rep the call was routed to, and most importantly for me, dialed number.

The call with the red box around it was one that I know came from one of our marketing campaigns — I can tell by the dialed number. From here I can run reports on each of the numbers to see which one is drawing the most calls. This call, for example, gives further ROI on our web advertising campaign on Google. Before implementing this, we only knew how many people clicked and filled out a web form. Now we know how many prospects forego the web form and call a sales rep instead. I can then run the caller ID against Leads, Opportunities and Accounts in Salesforce.com.

To take this even a step farther, I can actually automatically convert these calls into actual Leads in Salesforce.com by using one of our packaged integrations called LeadByFone, which does a reverse lookup on caller ID and inputs the name and address information from that reverse lookup as a new Lead in Salesforce.com. I’ll cover that in my next post.

Using your IVR application to track marketing campaigns has a definitive effect on the ROI of those campaigns. Don’t miss out on knowing where your phone leads are coming from.

That’s an actual quote from salesforce.com about our latest Appexchange product, ReachByFone, which was declared the App of the week on the Appexchange blog.

So what is ReachByFone?

First, a word about the problem ReachByFone was built to solve.

Did you know that 6 out of 7 calls placed by a salesperson end up either unanswered or in voice mail?

Think about it. More than 85% of the time, a salesperson who picks up the phone to reach out to a prospect will not talk to a person after they dial the number!

Now, think about what the sales manager expects the demoralized salesperson to do, day in and day out: She not only expects them to dutifully make the calls and log the fact that they actually made every single call, but also expects them to set up a follow-up task for all calls, including the ones that ended up nowhere or in voice mail.

Talk about unrealistic expectations! No wonder one of the most frustrating tasks a sales manager has to wrestle with is accurately tracking his/her sales force activities, regardless of how sophisticated the CRM system they are using may be.

Now, what if the overhead of logging activities about calls was so streamlined that all a sales person had to do was click on a link from their CRM solution, then talk or leave a voice mail, and the system would then automatically log to the CRM that a call was made and then automatically create a follow-up task?

What if, after talking to a lead and before hanging up the phone, the salesperson briefly interacted with an IVR and answered a couple of questions about their call including setting up a follow-up date and type (email or phone), so that by the time they hang up, the next thing they needed to do was call the next lead on their list — i.e., click another number?

Well, at least for people using salesforce.com, imagine no more!

We have just published our 5th Appexchange deployment, ReachByFone: Click-to-Call IVR Solution. Check it out at http://www.reachbyfone.com/

Here’s how it works: You, the sales person, click on the new “Phone Link” field on your lead, a call is placed out to you, you pick up the phone, the IVR on the phone tells you that it is connecting you to your lead, then it transfers you to the lead. You talk to them, complete the call, the lead hangs up, you hang on, you interact with the IVR to leave comments about the call, set up how you would like to follow up and how many days from now you want to do the follow up, hang up, and presto, an activity is logged saying that you made the call, and a follow up task is automatically set as you specified.

Try it out. Again, it’s at http://www.reachbyfone.com/

For our other salesforce.com solutions, which include a survey application, lead capture solution, call recording application and a support desk solution, check us out at: SalesforceByFone (http://www.angel.com/partners/salesforce.jsp)

I am late-comer to the Geoffrey Moore bandwagon and only recently got to finally read his seminal book, “Crossing the Chasm,” but this past Wednesday, I became a full convert after listening to him talk at a panel of VCs at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference. The man is an impressive intellect, very friendly and affable, and quick on his feet. He is a firm believer in the Appexchange project, fully buys into the mash-up movement and composite solutions sold on an on-demand marketplace, thinks ERP on-demand is almost an oxymoron and a waste of time to pursue (salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff had mentioned in the keynote that ERP on demand was something that salesforce.com was pursuing!), and firmly believes that boot-strapping, as opposed to seeking investors, is the best way to go for new start-ups, especially with the advent of the open-source movement and web 2.0 tools.

All of that is good, but the reason why I was captivated by Moore was this piece of advice he gave: if you want to capture market share, he said, seek out the most disenfranchised department in a company and empower them. The on-demand service provider, he said, is almost uniquely equipped to fulfill such needs. This is something that rang very true with what I have seen here at Angel.com….

Another zinger he came up with was the advice that many service providers fail because their solutions were “too expensive to buy and too cheap to sell”. In other words, make sure that you target the right market with the right price, and implement the processes that can sustain your margins.

As for Moore’s verdict on where salesforce.com and the Appexchange stood as far as the chasm was concerned: well, salesforce.com has crossed it, looks like, but the Appexchange is still working on it. Let’s see where things stand next year….

Technorati Tags: angel.com, appexchange, geoffreymoore, dreamforce, salesforce.com, salesforcewatch

Another long day winding down here at Dreamforce. A great keynote from Colin Powell — details can be found at ZDNet’s Between the Lines

The good general was literally all over the map, from Russia to Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, and Europe, regaling the audience with humorous stories about his time as Press Secretary. No real one take-away, as such, except for how while he was at State, the department’s web site information about foreign diplomats and government officials was regularly updated only once every three months! “I don’t want us tied to a lunar cycle,” he ordered (I am paraphrasing here), “I want reality reflected as it happens.” No big lessons there, but you know on-demand has gone mainstream when a government bureaucracy hops on the evangelizing bandwagon.

A couple of photos to share with you. Here’s one of the Angel.com gang standing by the booth.

From left to right: Josh Abich, Vishal Chordia, Jason Hochman, Ahmed Bouzid, and David Toliver.

The one below is of Carol Connolly of LifeScienceMedia, who dropped by the booth, trying out our sweepstakes Golf Club giveaway.

Back to the floor for more hand pumping….

Technorati Tags: angel.com, appexchange, colinpowell, dreamforce, salesforce.com, salesforcewatch

You know you’re in the money when the registration line for your expo. is so long that it takes people a whole hour to just sign in and pick up their badge! That was the case with salesforce.com’s Dreamforce four-day event that kicked off this past Sunday evening in San Francisco. (According to salesforce.com’s press release, more than 5,000 attendees are expected. ) Luckily, the Angel.com team — five strong and ready to rumble — got in just early enough to beat the crush….

Last year, I attended Dreamforce as an “observer” and was there to witness the official launching of Appexchange – salesforce.com’s directory of ready-to-use applications that salesforce.com users can “download” into their account and use. This year, Angel.com is participating as a full partner with our own booth and four published Appexchange solutions! Check out our products press release.

Appexchange has come a long way since last year. Back then, the number of applications deployed in the directory was 75, if I recall correctly, and more than half of those applications were actually developed by salesforce.com. The number of applications deployed on the Appexchange now has topped the 400 mark, 40 of which — according to a couple of Appexchange managers I spoke with — were published in just the past two weeks! Needless to say, the vast majority of the 400 deployed applications were not developed by salesforce.com but by their partners.

The kick-off key-note address by salesforce.com’s CEO, Mark Benioff, was excactly what I expected it to be: loud and bullish (not to say bombastic) about the Software as a Service (Saas) “movement”, with salesforce.com — of course — playing the central, leading role in the revolution. According to Gartner, Benioff announced, by 2011, 25% of software will be delivered as SaaS. To be honest, gigantic as that share is or will be, I had the sense that Benioff really believes that Gartner is lowballing the numbers…. At least that is the vibe he continually kept sending, taking every opportunity in his talk to take a jab at the usual giant suspects (Microsoft, Oracle, Siebel, etc.) and hinting, barely jokingly, at their impending spectacular demise.

I will let you delve into the details of that keynote at Mark Mangano’s salesforcewatch.com blog (more about Mark and his blog shortly), but here are some quick observations about the show so far.

First, I noticed that neither Contactual nor Five9, the two ACD providers who were part of last year’s initial Appexchange deployment, is exhibiting this year. In fact, Five9’s Appexchange listing is no longer in the directory, as far as I can tell, while Contactual’s lone listing has not been updated since October 4, 2005! I won’t speculate as to the reason behind all that, but I will say that I am glad we decided to take a long-term approach to making in-roads with salesforce.com. Not surprisingly, a lot of salesforce.com people stopped at our booth and chatted it up with us about our solutions and our future plans (to be announced in detail in the next few days).

Second, I was surprised — pleasantly — to note that a large number of visitors to our booth expressed interest in our SupportByFone solution — our very first deployment! I say surprised because Service and Support was one of the applications that salesforce.com deployed in the original Appexchange and only a miniscule number of salesforce.com customers were using salesforce.com for support when we came out with SupportByFone back in April, 2006. I would not be surprised, however, (and I will get the numbers) if the number of Service and Support users has grown by an order of magnitude or so since then…. And that, of course, would certainly be just fine with us, indeed!

Third, traffic at our booth was healthy and at times hectic (in a good way), and unlike in Speechtek, the vast majority of the people we spoke with were potential buyers rather than analysts, partners, or just technology enthusiasts. What was also pretty gratifying was the fact that the people we spoke with fully understood and subscribed to the “hosted solutions” model, and they all quickly got what made Angel.com such a compelling and empowering offering.

Last thing I will touch on today — many things to talk about, so little time — is my conversation with Mark Mangano, publisher of the premier independent blog about salesforce.com, salesforcewatch.com. Mark stopped by the booth and greeted me with a warm handshake, as if were old buddies, even though we had never interacted before that point. Turns out he reads the Angel.com blog and recognized my name as one of the authors. Such is the power of blogs and the written word! I myself have been reading his blog for a few months (he launched it in end of 2004) and have found it a very useful resource for honest and fair commentary about salesforce.com, and so was also glad to put a face to a name and a blog! Many stories we did exchange, but the one I want to share with you is how Mark got to have a personal session with Benioff (at the request of salesforce.com) and a tour of the facilities no less, when salesforcewatch.com was giving voice and serving as a platform for frustrated customers during salesforce.com outages last year. Now THAT is empowering in the full sense of the word!

I will blog tomorrow from the floor and will post some pictures to give you a sense of the electric energy level prevailing throughout the event. For now, I will turn in and rest for the next tidal wave.

Technorati Tags: angel.com, dreamforce, appexchange, saas, salesforce.com, salesforcewatch, speechtek

In a previous post, I showed you how you can open new cases in Salesforce.com from an Angel.com Voice Site without writing a line of code. Since then, we have worked on putting together a more comprehensive guide that provides step-by-step instructions on how to enable an Angel.com Voice Site to communicate and interact with a Salesforce.com account.

The guide can be found at: http://custom.angel.com/salesforce/api/ADC_SFDC_API10.pdf

The document focuses on Service and Support functions and details how Salesforce.com cases can be created, checked, updated, and closed, and how information about a Salesforce.com contact can be retrieved in real time.

This means you can now build voice applications that can interact with a Salesforce.com account and log new cases, check the status of cases, update and closes cases, and retrieve a contact’s information, all in real-time during calls.

Future versions of the API will include traditional CRM functions, such as creating or retrieving a lead, an opportunity, a contact, scheduling a task, etc.

If you have any feedback on the guide, or have suggestions on Salesforce.com functions you would like to be able to invoke from Angel.com, email me at bouzid@angel.com.